Fat Cats Fight Back

Before you start jumping to conclusions based on what our guest Sorcerer Spendy is trying to convince you of, let me set the record straight. FI Guy and I have always been a bit; oh what would you call it? “Thrifty”. In comparison to most of our friends and family we have always lived well below our means.

In many ways, we started on this path to Financial Freedom years ago but didn’t really know that’s what we were doing.

Now there is a key flaw in Sorcerer Spendy’s analysis. What he fails to mention are all of the things we are NOT spending money on. For example:

Mortgage Payments

Car Loans

Cable TV

Cell Phone

Lawn, Snow and Home Cleaning Services

Credit Card Interest

Alcohol, Bars and Clubs

These are all pretty big things to NOTbe paying for and boy do they add up to some massive savings over time. Let’s take a look at the how and why you won’t see these items listed on our budget or expense reports any time soon:

Mortgage payments:

We owned our first home outright by the age of 30 using only money we earned in our twenties. The cost savings from living in some pretty cheap apartments helped us achieve this one! FU Dr. Debt!

If you’re interested in some lessons learned on the topic of home ownership then checkout our article titled “Our Biggest Mistake”. Vision is always 20/20 in hindsight.

Car loans:

We paid for our vehicles in full and have only purchased small base model sedans with good gas mileage and no thrills or frills. FI Guy doesn’t even have automatic door locks!

We both drive our cars in to the ground before thinking of purchasing new vehicles. (Duct tape and all)

The only flaw here is that we have 2 cars and both drive to work. If we were really super savers we’d have 1 car and live close enough to work so we could walk or bike. Unless one of us changes jobs soon, this won’t be happening as we both work in complete opposite directions.

Cable TV bills:

For a couple of years we had a nice package that included TV, Internet and Phone that only cost us $89 per month. Then one day the bill sky rocketed to over $179 per month for the same services! We called the cable company and they didn’t do much to help us out. In fact what they suggested would have cost us more. What blasphemy! So we cut everything but Internet.

Now we pay $65 per month for high speed Internet. We thought this would be a big sacrifice but the reality is after just one month, we didn’t even notice these services were gone. We have more than enough to keep us busy and entertained using just the Internet and our Netflix subscription which is just $10 more a month.

Cell phone bills:

We are fortunate (and unfortunate) that work has been covering our cell phone bills for the last several years. We are leashed to work 24/7 but why carry around and pay for 2 phones when you just need 1? I can use that extra money toward other things…like retiring early!

Some day we will have to get our own cell phones and service but we will be sure to do our research and only pay for what we really need.

Lawn / Snow removal /Home cleaning services:

After buying our home we started looking in to the cost of these basic services and were shocked at the cost! So we decided we could do without.

While it can be argued we don’t do that great of a job, we do all of these things ourselves. It still feels like too much of a luxury to just throw money at those problems especially when it doesn’t really bring us that much more happiness.

Credit card interest:

We only purchase what we can afford to pay off each month. If we don’t have the cash in the bank, we’re not buying.

We only use credit cards that rack up rewards and give cash back. We tend to use the cash back toward paying the balance.

We prefer to use credit cards on every purchase to make for easy tracking of expenditures and for capturing those rewards. I mean it’s literally FREE MONEY! Plus, in the caveman days when we only used cash, it was way too easy to lose track of where all that money was going! Remember, we live in the future now. Cash is so old school. We love technology.

Alcohol / Bars and Clubs:

This isn’t something that either of us enjoy so why dump a crap ton of money in to something we don’t enjoy?

If we wanted to drink, we would be more apt to purchase alcohol at a local store and bring it back home rather than spend $15 on a fancy drink at a noisy, crowded bar.

Even with all of these things that we don’t spend money on, we don’t really feel like we are missing out on anything.

We have everything we need and then some. Even without cable, driving a fancy car or bar hopping every weekend, we have it pretty damn good and we are grateful for that. So yeah, maybe Sorcerer Spendy was right after all….

We are FAT CATS living a life of luxury

Have you taken a look at your expenditures lately? Are there things that you are burning money on that just don’t bring you that much happiness? What do you truly value?

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